Takashi Murakami 'eats his own leg' at Vancouver Art Gallery

An exhibition by Takashi Murakami, one of the world’s most-successful and recognized contemporary artists from Japan, opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery on Saturday.

Murakami is one of the rare artists who have broken out from the art world into popular culture. He’s done that by, among other things, working with major international brands such as Issey Miyake and Louis Vuitton. He’s also worked with high-profile musicians Kanye West — he made a video and the album cover for Graduation — and Pharrell Williams — they made a sculpture together that is reported to have sold for $2 million.

But he’s probably best-known as the artist who has appropriated the visual forms of otaku, Japan’s geek culture of anime (animation), manga (comic books) and science fiction.

The exhibition is called The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg. It’s the kind of title that makes people stop for a moment and wonder: Is that true? In fact, it is. An octopus, possibly because it is infected with a bacteria or virus, can eat its own limb. Sometimes, the limb grows back and the octopus survives; sometimes it doesn’t and the octopus dies.

Artist Takashi Murakami with one of his works in the exhibit titled The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg.Arlen Redekop /
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For Murakami, the title can be seen as a metaphor for his own situation as an artist: He consumes Japan’s rich historical and contemporary visual culture and remakes it for the West. While Murakami is lauded outside of Japan as a major contemporary artist, he hasn’t received the same kind of critical acceptance at home.

The octopus plays a big role in the exhibition. Outside, on the north facade overlooking the new plaza on West Georgia Street, there are banners depicting a massive skull and writhing octopus legs. In the interior rotunda, is Chakras Open and I Drown Under the Waterfall of Life, a five-metre sculpture of water and octopuses. In the recessed niches around the rotunda are pink-and-blue-swirling octopus legs.

Bruce Grenville, one of the exhibition’s coordinating curators, said Murakami wanted to make the exhibition as highly visible as possible.

“He’s really interested in creating visibility for his work and contemporary art — and its place in life,” Grenville said. “He knows he has to push it in different ways.”

From the perceived debris of the universe, we are still yet unable to reach the stage of nirvana, acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on wood panel, by Takashi Murakami. /PNG

Release Chakra's gate at this instant, acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on wood panel, by Takashi Murakami. /PNG

The exhibition has more than 55 paintings and sculptures that span 30 years. They include Mr. DOB, his signature animated figure that you might mistake for a distant cousin of Mickey Mouse. Over time, DOB has grown in size, complexity and grossness into the visually stunning, five-panel Tan Tan Bo Puking — a.k.a. Gero Tan. From its origins as a cute creature, it has metastasized into a drooling, sharp-toothed behemoth.

Grenville admits that Murakami’s work can be a little difficult for some people to take all at once.

“When you come here into the gallery, you see paintings that are massive, overwhelming, immaculate and completely finished. They look like impossible objects. You’re thinking: ‘How the hell is this possible?’ ” Grenville said.

“All you see is the perfection — what you don’t see is the doubt and the colossal struggle it takes to make them.”

Detail of Klein’s Pot A by Takashi Murakami.

With more recent paintings, Murakami changes direction with works that depict old Buddhist monks or arhats. The 10-panel work 100 Arhats was inspired by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima that killed more than 15,000 people. They’re inspired by an older Japanese tradition that dates back more than 1,000 years, one that Murakami studied for his university doctorate in nihonga, or modern Japanese painting.

In an interview last year when he was in Vancouver, Murakami acknowledged that he’s considered a much bigger contemporary artist outside of Japan.

“In contemporary Japanese society, my standing is nothing,” he said.

He compared himself with Andy Warhol, the American pop artist who had numerous detractors when he was alive.

As evidence of how he’s regarded at home, Murakami said that only one painting and one sculpture of his are in Japanese museums — one in a private institution, the other, public.

I asked him how this made him feel.

“Like, I was very sad,” he said. “Right now, it is OK, because this is the reality.”

Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg runs until May 6 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.Arlen Redekop /
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Murakami’s early appropriation of otaku meant that he was embracing a “culture of impotence” that many Japanese didn’t want to acknowledge following its defeat in the Second World War. Okatu culture, he wrote, created a “psychological escape zone for defeated spirits.”

Murakami referred to one influential story called Uchuu Senkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato), a blockbuster TV series that began in 1974 about the warship Yamato sunk during the Second World War before it could fight in battle.

“Japan — a country weakened, made impotent in its defeat,” Murakami wrote in Impotence Culture: Anime. “The more anime has attempted an honest understanding of this impotence, the more ripples it has caused and the more otaku have been shunned within Japanese society. Neither the otaku nor the otaku-haters realize that their early works are merely a form of self-portraiture. No, they actively don’t want to realize it.”

As part of his re-evaluation of Japanese visual culture, Murakami created a term called Superflat, which means the erasure of differences between high and low culture. Murakami compared it with the moment when a number of different layers in a desktop graphic program merge into one.

“It is an original concept of Japanese who have been completely westernized,” he wrote in the catalogue to the 2000 exhibition Superflat. “It is the art at the centre of a Japanese culture that lacks prestige, authority, celebration and cost.”

The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and curated by its chief curator, Michael Darling. At the VAG, Diana Freundl is the second coordinating curator.

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